More about the OpenOffice.org Hackfest

Few days ago I shortly mentioned the OpenOffice.org Hackfest, and today I asked my friend Florian Effenberger – OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead – to tell us more about the event, to be held on the 6-7 of November at the Attraktor in Hamburg.

How did you come up with the idea to run an hack-fest?

It’s always great to see people face to face and build a relationship with them. Meetings of the community usually strenghten it and help in getting more volunteers contributing to open source. In addition, to get into the OpenOffice.org codebase, an interactive workshop is much more helpful than a forum or a mailing list. So, we organized the HackFest. 😉

To whom this event is dedicated?

It’s for people who are already OpenOffice.org hackers/coders, and for those aspiring to become.

Is Oracle backing this initiative or it’s just a community event?

It’s a pure community event, organized by community volunteers.

How many attendees do you expect? Will you foster the creation of teams working on new extensions or what?

10-30 attendees – there’s no really fixed agenda, the event will be run as an unconference, i.e. with and by the participants – so if there are two or more people wanting to hack on extensions, they’ll just do that.

Goals of the event:

  • offer face time to existing devs, strengthen community & bonding
  • get existing hackers up to speed quickly in unknown code areas
  • find new hackers in & around Hamburg